[PakG1]

For what it's worth, MDPI has a lot of criticisms from academia as a publisher. Criticisms regarding editorial reliability, methodology acceptance, rigour, etc, etc. Here's just a smattering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI#Evaluation_and_controvers...

It's been enough where I end up automatically ignoring MDPI papers unless someone I respect recommends one to me. For better or worse. But MDPI made it's own bed in many ways.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

I've heard this and actually had a paper published in an MDPI journal. My personal experience was that it was astonishing quick to do so. Usually the submission/review/acceptance/publishing process is many months but this was less than two if I remember correctly. The paper was reviewed and the reviewer comments were reasonable. Not just editorial but with technical comments. So that seemed fine. As soon as we submitted the revised manuscript it was pretty much published immediately. So all the normal steps were followed, just at a faster rate it seemed.

Again, this is my one and only experience with them. I'd be interested if others have any...

[kragen]

those criticisms are from people who think that publishers and reviewers should evaluate scientific papers, when obviously the right way to evaluate papers is by the larger research community over the course of many years. worse, many of the criticisms are from institutions that are attempting to use bibliometrics for hiring and tenure decisions, which is an obviously stupid idea

most papers are worthless, but when they are first written, it is too early to tell which ones they are; of course reviewers' suggestions are often helpful in improving the quality of a paper, but they cannot improve a worthless paper into a groundbreaking one

pre-publication peer review was instituted mostly in the mid-twentieth century and should be regarded as a failed experiment belonging to the age of paper. most peer-reviewed papers are worthless, and peer review often serves merely to retard progress

most of the papers i see on mdpi are mediocre, but some are useful, and it certainly isn't vixra-style garbage

[godelski]

Peer review is great in theory, but fails because it makes too many assumptions and because the incentive structure. And it certainly doesn't scale well. It's important to remember that the point of publishing is communication. Anything more or less is ill founded.

It is obtuse to think that a few people can read a paper and know it's validity. It's falsifiable but even that's fuzzy. The problem then comes down to the incentive structures. Why do people cheat? Because we're lazy evaluators. It's odd to me that we won't read the works of peers in a department, lab, whatever. But doing that would be a much stronger form of evaluation than anything that could be inferred from citations, h-index, conference ranking, etc. Plus, the structure is to push novelty fast and frequently. That's not only not possible but ignores a fundamental aspect of science: reproducibility.

But this also doesn't mean there aren't scam publishers and publishers scammers prefer. But I'd say that those are a result of the former issue. Because metrics are not being treated as guides. It's just Goodhart's Law in action.

[kragen]

entirely agreed

i don't think mdpi is a scam publisher, but then, i don't read mdpi papers from following some kind of latest-mdpi-papers feed; i read them because other papers cite them, so i couldn't tell you if the utter-bullshit-paper percentage on mdpi is 1% or 99%

i just know i heave a sigh of relief when the paper i'm looking for turns out to be on mdpi, because i know that not only will i be able to read it without hassle, it will have a clearly marked creative-commons license that permits me to archive and redistribute the paper. same with hindawi actually, though i'm mmaybe a bit prejudiced against hindawi papers

[godelski]

Yeah I can't say anything about MDPI, and this isn't in my domain. My domain is in ML and all I can say there is that the signal to noise ratio over conference publications and arxiv papers is within error. But research continues for the same reasons it always has, because people are communicating and niches know their niches. But I think it doesn't bode well for Academia or even industry, who are letting the metrics dictate how they evaluate people. Especially for industry, where things have to end up working. I think Gemini is doing a great job at showing how being great on benchmarks doesn't mean you're a great tool. It's because benchmarks are only guides. When they aren't, they will be hacked (if they already aren't). And that's a dangerous situation to be in.

[kragen]

here are some mdpi papers i have in my bookmarks file; all of these seemed pretty decent, if i recall correctly

http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/8/622/htm a 2016 #paper on #solar #energy payback times and EROEI (“EROI”) and life-cycle analysis (LCA) and net energy analysis (NEA). In particular fixed ground-mounted “multicrystalline” silicon #photovoltaic cells have EPBT of 0.9 to 2.1 years depending on irradiation (insolation), and an EROEI of 15 to 35. This is surprising because that’s pretty much what it was when NREL published an EPBT analysis around 2001 or so.

https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/2/1/1/htm “#Energy Inputs in #Food Crop Production in Developing and Developed Nations,” Pimentel’s #EROEI #paper where he found about four joules returned per joule spent on industrialized #agriculture, #CC-BY, Energies 2009, 2(1), 1-24; https://doi.org/10.3390/en20100001

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/2/438 Elfring, Torta, and van de Molengraft’s more comprehensive #particle-filters #tutorial #paper (with #PDF) which supposedly has example code that I can’t find. This is recent (02021) and open-access (#CC BY, I think), and many pages long, and has an overview of a lot of the motivation, but in some sense not very approachable.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-163X/12/2/220 #CC #paper describes various excavation methods (plasma, foam injection, etc.) including #expanding-grout, which it says works by hydrating lime under confinement and also producing ettringite, but lists four different types: type K (4CaO·3Al₂O₃·SO₃ + 8CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 6Ca(OH)₂ + 74H₂0 → 3(3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3 CaSO₄⋅32H₂O, can be enhanced with silica fume and plasticizer), type M (CaO⋅Al₂O₃ + 3CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 2Ca(OH)₂ + 24H₂O → 3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3CaSO₄⋅32H₂O), type S (3CaO⋅Al₂O₃ + 3CaSO₄⋅H₂O + 26H₂O → 3CaO⋅Al₂O₃⋅3CaSO₄⋅32H₂O), and class [sic] G (CaO + H₂O → Ca(OH)₂). Calls it “SCDA” and mentions ASTM C 845 “Standard Specification for Expansive Hydraulic Cement”. It says they work too slowly (12h) to replace explosives in the usual mining cycle, but I suspect that’s not true of class G, where the main problem is keeping it from reacting to completion before you can pour it into the hole.

[PaulHoule]

Accusations against MDPI, Frontiers and such take this form

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_publishing

the claim is that they are ripping off the scientists. Note

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Beall

was forced to retract his claim that MDPI was predatory.

[kragen]

some do take that form, yes; others are simply complaints that tenure and hiring boards were going to have to evaluate the quality of candidates' research for themselves because mdpi wasn't doing it for them

[PaulHoule]

Go take a look at Frontiers.

[light_hue_1]

There are reasonable MDPI journals, and reasonable Frontiers. Just like there are predatory IEEE journals and conferences.

You can't just look at the publisher.

A quick shortcut is to look at who are the editors/organizers. If you don't see affiliations from the West, it's unfortunately a very bad sign.

[PaulHoule]

... and plenty of ethical problems in terms of the very business model of Science, Nature, Elsevier and all that. Not to mention what they've done to maintain their comfortable position.

MDPI is the most active RSS feed by far in my collection, they publish a lot of stuff. I'd be interested in getting feeds of Open Access papers on other journals (say from Science) but so far no dice.